Two views on corruption

by Harwant Singh
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Who cheats? That is a question posed by two well-known economists, Levet and Dubner. Then they go on to answer: Well, just about anyone where the stakes are right. You might claim that you don’t cheat, forgetting the time you cheated! The golf ball you nudged out of a bad lie or, ‘forgot’ to sign for the last drink in a crowded bar.

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Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it certainly is a prominent feature in just about every field of human activity.

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Levett and Dubner claim that cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the lowly babu who pockets a few thousand to move a file, or the high-profile bureaucrat or mighty minister who collects a large sum to clear a project or take a portion of an illegal building or a doctor who takes entrance exam on behalf of a duff candidate for his entry into a medical college for a few lakhs. From teachers who want to show better performance of their class to cricket players in match fixing, or an athlete who takes a drug to win a medal, to sanctioning the change of land use, or reducing the import duty to favour a cartel etc, bending rules in the process, cheating is across the board and the list is endless and the spread is far and wide.

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Executives and other dignitaries cheat out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain advantage by whatever means necessary. To them a thing worth having is worth cheating for. The corrupt people, like thieves, have a bonding amongst them. They cover and protect each other. Thus a Defence Secretary Bhatnagar when charge-sheeted by the CBI in the Bofors case was sent as Lt-Governor, placing him beyond the reach of the long, but palsied arm of law. Prosecution witnesses, the whole bunch of them, in corruption cases can turn hostile, if the incentives are right.

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Where there are pools of corruption and malfeasance, even non-swimmers can safely dive in: without the fear of drowning. When the environments are clean and chances of being found out are high, there is a disincentive for cheating, but where the chances of being pointed out are low or absent, one may commit murder, knowing that get-away is easy.

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There is a tale, ‘The Ring of Gypes,’ from Plato’s ‘Republic.’ A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates. He told of a shepherd named Gypes who stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gypes put on that ring he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behaviour, he seduced the queen and murdered the king and so on. Glaucon’s story poses a moral question: could any man resist a temptation of evil if he knew his act could not be witnessed! Glaucon thought the answer was no, while for Socrates the answer was yes. Such are the two views on corruption.